bitbucket.kylewelsh.com

While US courts have gotten much better lately at realizing that keyword advertising is not, by itself a violation of trademark law, judges in some other countries have had trouble recognizing the same thing. France, in particular, seems to have judges who consistently are confused over the matter. Remember, the purpose of trademark law is not to give total control over the mark to the holder, but to prevent consumer confusion. It’s so they’re not tricked into buying Bob’s Cola thinking that it’s Coca Cola. If someone does a search on a trademarked term, and it shows a variety of ads, including from competitors to the holder of the trademark, that’s not a violation of trademark — it’s just competition. It certainly isn’t trademark infringement on the part of the search engine, who is merely hosting the ad. If anything, it might be trademark infringement on the part of the advertiser, but only if the ad itself is somehow designed to confuse the consumer.

Thankfully, it looks like the High Court in the UK has recognized the issues at play and has come out with a ruling more like the American courts than the French courts, noting that there is no trademark violation for search engines in these cases. This specific case involved Yahoo, who was getting sued by someone who owned a trademark on “Mr Spicy.” He claimed that competitor’s ads were showing up when someone searched on “Mr Spicy.” That was true, but it wasn’t even because anyone had set up keywords on “Mr. Spicy.” They had merely set up keywords on “spicy,” which still showed up on a search for “Mr Spicy.” Of course, even if it had been on “Mr. Spicy” it wouldn’t have mattered much, since it still wasn’t Yahoo’s issue. Also, the court seems to recognize that since the ads themselves don’t even refer to Mr Spicy, it’s hard to see how there’s any loss or confusion that would violate the trademark. Hopefully other courts around the world will start employing similar logic as well.

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I thought the social-network train had left me at the station. Sure, I’ve had a Facebook page for a couple of years, but I rarely use it. Same with the MySpace page I created back in 2006 as part of a story I was editing on how to get started with the service. I’m more active on LinkedIn because of the business focus of that network, though I usually visit the site only when I get an alert via e-mail about some new connection.

Why was I exhibiting such antisocial tendencies on the Internet? Was I doomed to be a Web wallflower? Just when I thought all hope for an online social life was lost, I found Ning, a do-it-yourself social-network service that has been around since 2004, but that had a major facelift early last year.

Why use Ning rather than one of the big-name social networks? The service lets you start quickly using its prefab tools, or add your own CSS and HTML to customize your network’s look and functionality. You have to put up with text ads along the right side of the screen if you sign up for the free service, but $20 a month lets a group or business run its own ads, or go ad-less entirely. If you need more than the 10GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth available from the free version, pay $10 a month for each additional 10GB/100GB. You can use your own domain name for $5 a month.

There’s much you can do with the service besides create a social network, but all I was interested in was making it easy for family members spread across the country to see pictures of our grandson. If I wasn’t having so much fun uploading and annotating the pictures, I could’ve had the network up and running in less than an hour.

Start by creating a profile: You need only provide an e-mail address, a name, and a password. Then you give your network a name, assign a domain that will end in “ning.com” (unless you pay to use your own domain name), and click Create Your Network to open the “About Your Network” page. Choose to make it public or private, enter a tagline and description, assign some keywords, pick a language, and upload an image to serve as the network’s icon.

Get your Ning network started by entering basic information about it.

The Features page lets you add RSS feeds, forums, videos, photos, and other components to your network, or you can skip this step and choose one of the service’s templates. Since I was looking for the simplest approach, I opted for one of the themes listed on the Appearance page. I could’ve customized the header, navigation, text, and other elements of the page, and developers can add their own CSS code by clicking the Advanced tab in the Customize section.

Create your Ning network from scratch by dragging and dropping components, or choose one of the service's network templates.

You can prompt network members to answer one or more questions to fill out their profile, and you can even make the questions mandatory, though their answers can be kept private from other members. By default, Ning asks their relationship status, “About Me,” and a Web site. After you view a summary of your network, click the Launch! button to get started. You’re prompted to enter and confirm a personal ID number, and then you’re ready to send out your invitations. You can do this singly, or in bulk by importing from your address book in Outlook or another client e-mail app, or from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, or AOL Mail. You can also send the invitations via a link placed in a message sent from your client mail app.

My initial foray into the world of custom social networks wasn’t particularly productivity-enhancing, but it sure was fun. That doesn’t mean there’s not a place for this type of service in the business world. The most obvious is using Ning to add a social-network component to a small-business or workgroup site. Anyone who’s playing catch-up with the social-networking phenomenon (like me) will get a leg up at Ning.

Tomorrow: use Word and Excel to construct simple forms.

Hulu is finally ready to make a public debut.

The Internet video site created by NBC Universal and News Corp. is officially launching on Wednesday. Up to now the site has been accessible to people on an invitation-only basis. Here’s one surprise: the Hulu honchos didn’t come up with a better name.

Nonetheless, the site that began five months ago with a meager menu of content is now offering a far wider selection of movies, current hit TV shows, as well as some syndication favorites.

Among the feature films are The Usual Suspects, Requiem for a Dream, and Ice Age. Some of the TV shows that Hulu will offer include Dirt, The Incredible Hulk, Babylon 5, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Welcome Back Kotter and The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Hulu will also offer NBA and NHL highlights and archived footage from past NCAA championship basketball games.

While recent studies shows strong consumer interest in long-form online video, Hulu will become the most ambitious test yet of whether the public is interested in watching full-length movies and TV shows on the Internet.

The company is not going into this alone. Hulu said in a statement that it will offer free videos from more than 50 top broadcast and cable networks, movie studios and Web content providers when it launches.

eldavojohn writes “The $200 Linux PCs discussed earlier last year have been discontinued for sale at Wal-Mart’s physical locations, though they will remain for sale at walmart.com. All this despite the systems repeatedly selling out. From the article, ‘Paul Kim, brand manager for Everex, said selling the gPC online was “significantly more effective” than selling it in stores.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals

Although Nyko’s wireless FrontMan axe is slated to land for Xbox 360 this June, it seems as though it has been beaten to the proverbial punch by some random rival from who knows where. Known only as “3rd Party,” the aforementioned company has seemingly crafted a wireless Explorer that plays nice with the Xbox 360, and better still, it looks to be available right now. Still, considering the fact that it’s labeled “Guitar for Games” and designed to function with the “X 360,” we’re not entirely sure we’d be willing to risk our $41.94. But hey, if you see “quality” written all over that image pictured above, we certainly aren’t going to stop you from pulling the trigger and hoping for the best.

[Via XBox 360 News]

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Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals

Although Nyko’s wireless FrontMan axe is slated to land for Xbox 360 this June, it seems as though it has been beaten to the proverbial punch by some random rival from who knows where. Known only as “3rd Party,” the aforementioned company has seemingly crafted a wireless Explorer that plays nice with the Xbox 360, and better still, it looks to be available right now. Still, considering the fact that it’s labeled “Guitar for Games” and designed to function with the “X 360,” we’re not entirely sure we’d be willing to risk our $41.94. But hey, if you see “quality” written all over that image pictured above, we certainly aren’t going to stop you from pulling the trigger and hoping for the best.

[Via XBox 360 News]

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Liz Gannes / NewTeeVee:

Hulu Launches with Warner, Lionsgate  —  Wow Hulu, you really pile it on, don’t you?  I can barely digest all the news the company is putting out tonight.  First and foremost, it’s launching tomorrow.  It’s also signed Warner Bros., Lionsgate, the NBA, and the NHL (but not Quincy Smith’s CBS).

Just about everyone seems to be submitting the story from last week about a local Kentucky legislator who has put forth a bill to make anonymous comments online illegal. I first saw the story on Digg, but it’s been submitted about 30 times already and is starting to show up elsewhere — sometimes with inflammatory headlines (including the one at Digg). First off, this is for Kentucky only. Second, the chances of the bill getting anywhere are slim to none. Third, even if it does miraculously pass, there is no way that it would be enforceable. In fact, even the guy who introduced the legislation admits as much. Fourth, the bill is clearly unconstitutional, violating our rights to anonymous speech (which has been reaffirmed many times by US courts). Fifth, it goes against section 230 of the CDA in that it puts the blame on service providers for the speech of their users, rather than putting the liability on the users themselves. In other words, while this gets some attention as a ridiculously bad bill, the chance of it actually going anywhere or having any impact at all is virtually nil.

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Steven Musil / CNET News.com:

Mozilla releases Firefox 3.0 beta 4  —  The fourth beta of the Firefox 3.0 browser was released Monday and includes more than 900 enhancements over the previous beta, Mozilla announced.  —  The creator of the open-source browser said the new beta includes performance and memory usage …

See our story about this San Diego drug developer in today’s briefing at VentureBeat LifeScience.

At a party for SXSW in Austin tonight, a man who got back to me too late to have an anonymous three-way screw back in January approached. Did he recognize me from my half-photo on craigslist? Had he…

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Filed under: Networking

If you’ll recall, the IEEE gave the all important thumbs up to 100G as the next Ethernet speed, and while we’ve seen such a milestone met on the Internet2, Verizon’s looking to bring it to the masses in just twelve short months. According to Fred Briggs, Verizon Business’ executive vice president of operations and technology, the firm is aiming to “deploy 100G network capabilities over all its major routes within the United States.” Verizon actually tested out its 100Gbps capabilities last year on a video transmission from Tampa to Miami, Florida, and apparently, the results “showed that it could deploy 100G on routes and not disrupt current wavelengths.” Granted, we wouldn’t expect many consumers to actually be able to take advantage of all this speed right away, but even if you’re not down with (or nearby) any of Verizon’s forthcoming offerings, there’s always DOCSIS 3.0.

[Image courtesy of Futurenet]

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